A Valentine for Hyeon Min Lee

You don’t know this yet, but your parents, Yong and Gloria are heroes. The funny thing is that they don’t know it, either. See, if you happen to read this, in maybe fifteen or sixteen years, they’ll just be those two folks who make you go to bed too early and make you take out the trash. You may not see them for what they are until you’re grown and gone and sitting on your Seattle or New York or Paris balcony, watching the sunset, and suddenly stop to consider the enormity of what they gave you, what they did for the simple joy of knowing you. If you’re like me, that moment will stay with you the rest of your life and you will never look at goofy old Yong and Gloria the same way again. The word “cherish” will come to have meaning for you and the great tenderness you’ll begin to know will be a powerful tool for making a success of the rest of your life.

See, we Americans have very funny ideas about what the word “hero” means. We use it as cheaply as catsup, slathering it on athletes, rock stars, actors, singers, community activists, fire fighters, soldiers, cops, and whistle-blowers. And many of those folks richly deserve the honor but I see it a little differently. Take a fire fighter, for example. A person who saves a life by running into a burning building to help someone to safety is surely a hero, in every sense of that word. But he or she saved that life, in that moment, by random chance and great courage. Then what? I suspect that, if you were to ask that fire fighter if they’d mind taking that person they saved home with them and spend the next sixteen to twenty years taking care of them and providing for their every need, you’d get some serious hesitation.

But that’s what Yong and Gloria Lee did. And when I say “Yong and Gloria Lee”, little man, I’m using your two, sweet parents as the example for everyone who performs this same act – thousands of them, in every country, every state, every city, every year, every day. It beggars my tiny imagination to try to grasp the degree of character and selflessness it requires to get onto a plane, fly sixteen hours, sign endless forms and jump through a thousand hoops, all for the benefit of a tiny human being you’ve never met.

Oh, of course, little man, they do get something out of it, too. As any parent knows, there is that thing in life that no money, no success, no status, no power can ever buy: the inexpressible joy of looking at your tiny chest, rising and falling as you sleep, and knowing that, for the rest of their lives, you will be an indispensable, irreplaceable, joyous, trying, laughing, crying part of their marriage and each of their souls. There is nothing in the life of a human being that can equal it. That’s their part of the deal.

Your part is what you already know: when you need something, Mom and Dad are there for you, no matter what it is, from a band aid for a boo-boo to a kind word and a hug when you need it most to the down payment on your first car. They’re the ones who are automatically and unfailingly on your side. They’re the ones who led you through your “invisible years”, that time when you were too young to comprehend what was happening. They saved your life again then, too. They pulled your hand away from the stove, capped all the sockets, hid all the good cutlery. And held you when you cried. As I write this, Hyeon Min, nearly all of this is in the future. You’re just barely here, near Seattle, from Korea. You sleep a lot and you’re still adjusting, in your own tiny way. But I know, beyond all possible doubt, that Yong and Gloria Lee will do all of those things and ten thousand more. That’s the kind of people they are. And that’s kinda funny, too, see, because I have actually never met your Mom and Dad. I made friends with your Pop the way a lot of people do these days, the way you will often, in the future: on Yelp and then Facebook.

But learning the content of someone’s character is more than just sharing the same air and physical space with them. It’s an accumulation of little things, pieces of idle conversation, chat, and the good opinions of mutual friends. I “know” Yong and Glo in the way that I know Shakespeare’s characters, Mother Teresa, or Dick Hoyt: by the good and the beauty that follows in their wake.

So, my dear little man, you are the product of heroes. I’m hoping for you that the moment of epiphany, when you finally get what Mom and Dad gave you, will happen a lot sooner than it did for me. I was, in fact, forty-eight years old, standing in my shower on Bainbridge Island, covered in suds, when it hit me the immense, planetary-sized sacrifices and adaptations my Mother and my maternal grandparents made so that I could have the happy, mostly uncomplicated childhood I did. In that moment, I burst into hot, scalding tears and fell to my knees, there on the wet tiles, and cried as I have never cried before or since…because my grandparents were both gone and I would never have the chance to sit with their hands in mine and simply say, “Thanks.”

My Mother is 82, a real, unsentimental, Virginia mountain woman who deflects praise the way tin sheds deflect rain. I’ve tried to tell her, several times, how much she’s meant to me and she simply shrugs and says, “I didn’t do all that much, really.” A friend told me that she had had the same conversation with her Mom, who got up, walked to the window, and looked out for a long time before turning back to face her and saying, “I didn’t do a lot…but what I did do, I’d do all over again right this minute.”

Someday, dear little man, you will have that same impulse and I pray that you’ll follow it. Your Mom may get misty. Your Pop, knowing him, will probably deflect it with self-effacing humor. And if they do respond, it will most likely be something along the lines of, “Oh, Hyeon, we really didn’t do all that much.” They won’t be saying that to, in any way, diminish what you feel and it will mean the world to them. But they’ll minimize their impact, while promoting your own strength and initiative.

Always remember, Hyeon, that you were not made part of the lives of Yong and Gloria Lee by some cosmic crapshoot of genetic chance. You, my friend, were chosen, selected: out of all the kids in the whole wide world, they chose you. Your heart reached out to them and touched them and they knew, down deep, that you were that missing piece, the thing that would complete their world. And this is why I write this, Hyeon, because, as a grandfather who will, by next week, have ten grandchildren, the very thought of any child, anywhere in the world, alone and unloved, makes my heart feel as though it’s screaming and makes it ache so that I sometimes feel that I’ll never be happy again. And, right now, here in 2012, seeing your picture, asleep in your father’s arms on Facebook, is just the balm my old, weary, well-used ticker needs to continue to embrace this world and the people who walk upon it. For that, I have to thanks those heroes I’ve never met: Yong and Gloria Lee.

So, when you do say thanks, expect them to downplay what they’ve done. They do that because of a fundamental impulse that they may not even be able to articulate. But I will. Just so you know. They do this for one simple reason, Hyeon…